Losers the Pink Collar Ghetto
by digby
On labor day I wrote a little post featuring my recollections of recessions past as a worker in the pink collar ghetto. I've been wondering how such workers have fared this time and E.J Graff has a good piece up today on the subject. Unfortunately it's not looking good:
Men lost more jobs and are still disproportionately out of work when compared to women. At the same time, men are starting—albeit just barely—to regain those jobs. Jobs disproportionately held by women, on the other hand, are not coming back. The Center for American Progress’s interactive graphic shows this by industry; click on “job losses” and then “play the timeline.” One reason: many “women’s jobs"* are government-funded. That includes teachers but also home health aides, nurse’s aides, child-care workers—all the jobs that make it possible for working families and single parents to show up for their swing shifts without locking the kids in the car for eight hours or leaving grandpa alone at home with a bedpan. Those jobs are paid for by state and local governments, which are still laying off workers. As Parramore puts it, “Women are the shock-absorbers for government budget cuts.”
There’s another reason, according to Bryce Covert and Mike Konczal at the Roosevelt Institute, that men are getting rehired and women are not, not just in the public sector but across private industries as well: office-support jobs are disappearing. Covert and Konczal say “support staff” positions often held by women—call them secretaries, office managers, administrative assistants—are being eliminated and not replaced. It’s part of the great speed-up: The rest are supposed to book our own travel, answer our own e-mails, schedule our own meetings. That leaves many office workers frantic—and a lot of women out of work.
That's a double whammy --- government jobs with decent pay, benefits and worker protections are being cut at the same time that many private sector jobs that are traditionally held by women are being eliminated.
Some of this could be alleviated by the Jobs Bill, which featured at least some money for states and localities to pay for government jobs that are often held by women. But it's probably unlikely that the pink collar ghetto jobs will come back. My recollection of the 92 recession was that the support jobs stayed consolidated and when the economy came back they just hired more high paid executives. I would imagine it's even worse now.
And yes, this leaves office workers frantic. But in a corporate world in which executive boards pay failed CEO cronies many hundreds of times more than the average worker, cutting labor costs to please Masters of the Universe has to come from somewhere. And it's only women for the most part so who cares, right?
.